SAMENESS or IDENTITY. This term is generally applied to what is called personal identity, or the sameness of a living and Intellectual being, as man. There are sonic remarks on this subject by Bishop Butler In his ' Dissertation of Personal Identity.
The mammas of objects which are external to a man consists in tho perception of a variety of circumstances as to these external objects and at different times, from which arises an opinion of sameness in a certain sense. A man sees a tree growing in a certain placo, and he may have remembered it for many years. But in the mean time the tree may have increased a hundred-fold in bulk, and therefore its substance is not the same as that of the tree which he first saw there ; and besides this, there may not be a single particle of matter the same in the tree at two remote times of his observation. The tree then is by the supposition not the same in a strict sense ; but for all practical purpose it Is called and is the same. A man can no more believe that all the change that the tree has undergone belongs to some other tree, than he can believe that the growth of his own body belongs to another being than himself.
When sameness is applied to a living and intellectual being, it includes both the matter of the body and something else. A man can have no doubt that his body is not entirely the same in youth, in middle age, and in old age. lie can view his body as he does any thing external, and he has a belief that it undergoes changes, and is there fore not the same in the strict sense. But yet he considers himself the Name person ; person here including something besides the body, whether that something be a property of an organised body or some thing else. Locke, as quoted by Butler, says, " that the consciousness of our own existence, in youth and in old age, or in any two successive moments, is not the same individual action, that is, not the same con sciousness, but different successive consciousneeses." Butler's answer to this vague talk is sufficient. But more may be said. How is con sciousness of our personal identity, or if this form of words be objected to as a way of begging the question, how is the thing called " con smeiniumeas of our existence" at any two successive moments shown to be " not the same consciousness, but different successive conscious neases f " What are successive moments in a man's consciousness of his own existence I It is more consistent with that consciousness which we have, to say that the consciousness of our personal identity is one and the same always ; and if it is allowed that there is in man a belief that he is at different times the same being, in some sense which lie cannot otherwise explain than that he feels that he is, it follows that this consciousness of personal identity is one indivisible thing, that it is as continuous as the personal identity itself which it pre mimeses. Nor is it any objection that a man's faculties may be temporarily impaired by illness, and he may lose the exercise of his reason and recover it; or an accident may befall him, which for a time renders his bodily and mental powers inactive, though he may finally recover both. On his recovery he does not doubt that he is the same person that he was before his illness or accident, and therefore his con sciousness is one. The division of consciousness by successive times,
corresponding to certain external signs, and the making that supposed succession a ground of objection to personal identity, is to confound things that are unlike, and to apply a measure to both that does not lit one of the things.
" Every person," says Butler, " is conscious that he is now the same person or self he was, as far back as his remembrance reaches." This .cannot be disputed. It is a bare fact that this consciousness dues exist in us. We have not this consciousness from the time of our birth up to manhood and old age : it does not go further back in its particular manifestations than our remembrance does ; yet we doubt not that we, the man, were once that particular child of our parents rather than any other child of these parents or of any other parents. But this belief is derived from evidence : our consciousness in its particular manifestations does not extend farther back than our remembrance. Yet remembrance does not make personal identity, as Butler remarks : " Consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute personal identity, any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes." The remembrance of particular things is a very different thing from the consciousness of personal Identity. When this consciousness begins, when it ends, how its activity is suspended, we know not : but we know that it is a law of our nature that, in the ordinary state of a man's bodily and Intellectual faculties, he has a perception, whatever it may be and however it may arise, whenever he reviews certain acts of his own or events in his life, that he the perceiver, and no other person, be the agent or is the person affected by these events. The remembrance then merely makes the consciousness of personal identity active ; and this consciousness of personal identity is not constituted of the remembrance of different acts or events, but is as permanent and uninterrupted as the animal life itself, which nobody supposes to consist of successive lives, but to be one life. And it should be observed that the question of personal identity only arises upon the suggestion of the memory. Every man all through his life feels that lie is in some sense or in some way, which he expresses by that been " is." And he is never without this present consciousness of existence. There is therefore an uninterrupted conscionsness, which, as already observed, is one, and not divisible by a measure of time. The remembrance of any particular act of a man's own or of any event in his own life, is a present act, and the consciousness of such present act of memory accompanied the act of memory as it does any other present act ; and as the act of memory is retrospective, so is the consciousness of that act of memory retrospective, but only incidentally, according to the nature of the act. The memory merely directs the conscious agent to an act of the kind called passed, and to a passed act of such a kind that the consciousness of sameness in the agent is inseparable from the notion of the act that is remembered.